Little Horus

Dan Abnett

            ‘Look like the innocent flower,

but be the serpent under it.’

            – Litus, Remarks.

            Let us speak of Little Horus, Little Horus Aximand. His aspect was the half moon, and his disposition, according to the humours, was inclining towards melancholia. This explained, many thought, his prevailing mood of sorrow and inner trouble, though he frequently denied it. ‘The melancholic humour is misunderstood,’ he said. ‘You think too literally. It has, in fact, the quality of autumn. It is the spirit of contemplative change, the accelerator of death, the enabler of ends and beginnings. Autumn clears away the world so that a new one may rise. This is my purpose. I am not sad.’

            Of course, once they reattached his face, all he ever really looked was angry.

            Dwell lay in their path, and illumination was required. The Dwellers were not Old Way ignorant. The shadows of the Long Night had been previously banished from their shores, and they had been compliant since their recovery thirty-two years earlier. The Dwellers had supplied eighty fine, loyal regiments to the Crusade armies.

            Isstvan was fresh in the memory, however, and blood-stained rumours of the infamy were spreading. A ferocious series of repercussive combats had flared through the Momed, Instar and Oqueth sectors. The instigator was a leader of the Iron Tenth, a flesh-spare warleader of the Sorrgol Clan named Shadrak Meduson, and it was he who marshalled the loyalists against the approaching fleet of the Warmaster’s 63rd Expedition. Meduson and his formations had come too late to stand with their Iron-handed master at Isstvan V. Rage, and calculated vengeance, smoked in his alloy heart. He had gathered fifty-eight full battalions of the Imperial Army about him, war hosts from the Momed voidhives, along with a flotilla of siege hulks from Nahan Instar, a half-broken cadre of Salamanders, some Mechanicum claves, and a White Scars raid-force rerouted from a return voyage to the Chondax war front.

            Dwell, with its fortified cities, orbital batteries, ship schools, and eight million pinnacle-grade fighting men, would be the cornerstone of Meduson’s line. And any fool could see the Elders of Dwell would never side against the Throne.

            It was a matter of priority that their ignorance be illuminated swiftly, before they fell in step with the determined son of Medusa.

            Aximand’s face had earned him his name, though he was not the only member of the Sixteenth Legion who resembled the primarch. For a good many, including the First Captain, elective genetics had guaranteed it. They were sons, true sons, amongst the Sons.

            Aximand was the most alike of them all. It was not only the face; there was something in the manner of him.

            Of course, he was Horus too, a common Cthonic name made popular because of the primarch. They were all sons of Horus in the end.

            Little Horus. That’s what he was called, in tones simultaneously affectionate and mocking: Little Horus Aximand.

            There was nothing little about him. Captain of the Fifth. One quarter of the Mournival.

            ‘He who serves as a captain here would be as a primarch in the company of others,’ said Abaddon, and he was talking of Aximand when he said it.

            The reattachment left a scar. It set the character of the face differently, altered the seating of the muscles. Somehow, the wrongness, the imperfection, made him more like Horus, not less.

            Steel forged on Medusa has such a fine edge.

            He had a dream he never shared with anyone. First Captain Abaddon had indeed proclaimed that dreams were a weakness to be eschewed by all the Adeptus Astartes. The dreamless Luna Wolves were surely the purest of all.

            But times changed. The Luna Wolves had become the Sons of Horus. Kin had become unkind. The all-father of man had become the enemy. And, since Isstvan, Little Horus Aximand had begun to dream.

            Every dream was essentially the same. Aximand would dream about the events of the day. The dream would match, in all particulars, his experiences, except that someone else was present. Someone else had come to join him, an intruder who remained just out of sight or in distant shadows, in the next room, or the corner of his eye. Aximand could not see the intruder’s face, but he knew he was there.

            Aximand could feel him watching. He could hear him breathing.

            Little Horus was afraid of the dreams at first. He was afraid to have started dreaming, afraid of what Abaddon might say if he found out, afraid of the faceless intruder watching him whenever he slept.

            But he was not afraid of change. Change was, he insisted, part of his ruling character.

            ‘The melancholic humour is protean,’ he said. ‘It possesses the quality of autumn. It is transformative, the accelerator of death, the enabler of ends and beginnings. Autumn clears away the world ready for renewal. This is my purpose. I am not afraid.’

            Then again, after they reattached his face, all he ever really looked was unlike himself.

            Another change, forced on them by the circumstances of Isstvan, was the loss of the Mournival. Changing the name of the Sixteenth, changing the colour of their armour, those transformations had been embraced willingly as positive reinforcements of their resolve. They had never changed their allegiance: they still followed Horus and the Imperium.

            The Mournival, though, the Mournival was a painful loss. That small clique of sons, of peers, of brothers, selected to counsel the Warmaster had always been vital, organic.

            Little Horus still wore the mark of the half-moon on his helm, above the right eye-piece.

            As the fleet translated into the Dwell system, he spoke to Abaddon on the subject.

            ‘It is an antiquated concept,’ said the First Captain. ‘See how poorly it served us at Isstvan?’

            ‘People served us poorly,’ Aximand replied, ‘not the Mournival. The Mournival was always intended to provide even-tempered advice. It was supposed to provoke discussion and dissent, so that we could properly debate each issue and be sure of arriving at balanced reasoning.’

            Abaddon looked at him, uncertain.

            Aximand smiled back.

            ‘It is true to say,’ he added, ‘that the decisions we had to make at Davin and Isstvan were so extreme, the natural dissent was...’

            ‘Was what?’ asked Abaddon.

            ‘Intense. Those who lost the argument could not be permitted to live. It is the way of things. When the matter is so great, those who speak against it become our enemies. They had to say no, for in their no our yes was consecrated.’

            They. Abaddon and Aximand never spoke the names any more. Previous members of the Mournival, perhaps: Berabaddon, Syrakul, Janipur and dear Sejanus. All of them were spoken of, as one would speak of beloved ancestors. But the last two to come and go, their names were never uttered. They were memories too painful for even a transhuman to bear.

            ‘The mechanism always worked,’ Aximand pressed, dropping his soft voice to a leaf-rustle whisper, making Abaddon bend closer to hear. Below them, the vast bridge bustled with activity.

            ‘The mechanism always worked, even when we had to kill our dissenters. The method was valid and valuable. The Mournival provides balance, and guarantees the right decisions.’

            ‘So you would reinstate it?’ asked Abaddon.

            ‘Do we not need balance now, more than ever?’

            ‘You would reinstate it?’ Abaddon repeated.

            ‘It was never gone,’ said Aximand. ‘There are simply vacancies.’

            ‘Who would you approach?’ asked Abaddon.

            ‘Who would you?’

            Abaddon sniffed.

            ‘Targost.’

            Aximand shrugged.

            ‘A sound suggestion. Serghar Targost is heartwood like us, but he is also lodge-master. The lodge needs him clear-minded, not compromised by Mournival duties.’

            Abaddon nodded, seeing the sense of this.

            ‘Falkus Kibre,’ said Abaddon.

            ‘Hmmm.’ Aximand smiled again. Widowmaker Kibre was a true son, but he was also Captain of the Justaerin, and thus Abaddon’s number two. Too much weight in one corner of the Legion.

            ‘Kibre’s an excellent man,’ he began.

            ‘Kalus Ekaddon,’ said Abaddon, before Aximand could finish.

            Ekaddon. Captain of the Catulan Reaver squad. Another of Abaddon’s company. Aximand wondered if Abaddon properly understood the concept of balance.

            ‘You make a suggestion, then,’ said Abaddon.

            ‘Tybalt Marr.’

            ‘The Either? He’s a good man, but he hasn’t got the stomach for the job, not even now he’s shaken off Moy’s shadow. Kibre is a good–’

            ‘Jerrod,’ said Aximand.

            ‘He’s got his hands full taking the reins of the Thirteenth now Sedirae’s gone,’ Abaddon replied.

            ‘He’s more than able.’

            ‘He is, but he has new responsibilities,’ said Abaddon.

            ‘Grael Noctua,’ said Aximand.

            The First Captain paused.

            ‘Of the Twenty-Fifth Warlocked?’

            ‘Yes.’

            ‘He’s just a squad commander.’

            Aximand shrugged. He took up a silver cup from the side table and sipped.

            ‘There is no rule that members of the Mournival be seniors or captains. In fact, if it were just composed of senior men, where would its point be? The Mournival is about balance and perspective. Wouldn’t a good squad leader’s insight complement the judgement of a first captain?’

            ‘Noctua is a fine soldier,’ Abaddon mused.

            ‘A captain in the making.’

            ‘He’s young.’

            ‘We were all young once, Ezekyle.’

            Abaddon took up a cup of his own, not to drink, just to have something to toy with while he considered.

           ‘There is precedence, of course,’ said Aximand. ‘To remind you, Syrakul was a squad leader when Litus proposed him. He was ascendant. He was young, but Litus saw his qualities. You’ve said yourself, Syrakul would have been first captain if he’d lived.’

            ‘The same could be said for many,’ Abaddon replied. ‘We should consult Lupercal and–’

            ‘Why would we?’ asked Aximand. ‘The Mournival has always been an autonomous body. Lupercal likes it that way.’

            Abaddon frowned.

            ‘I suppose. So, Kibre and Noctua?’

            ‘Yes.’

            ‘You will approach Noctua, if I make the overture to Falkus?’

            ‘Agreed.’

            ‘Put him in the line with you at Dwell,’ said Abaddon. ‘Measure him one last time to be sure. You know the old saying? Measure twice, cut once.’

            The Mausolytic Precinct was regarded as one of the top three objectives, along with the primary port and the city of the Elders. The Precinct was sited on a high plateau overlooking Tyjun and the Sea of Enna. In its great, stone structures lay the dead of Dwell, each previous generation interred in ritual cybernation so that their collective thoughts, memories and accumulated knowledge could be accessed and consulted, like books in a library.

            The Mausolytic Precinct was Aximand’s responsibility. First Company would lead the attack on the city of Elders. Lithonan, the acting Lord Commander of the Army, would take responsibility for the port, with Jerrod and the Thirteenth as their spearhead.

            ‘I would be disappointed if we were forced to lose a resource like the Mausolytic Precinct,’ the Warmaster told Little Horus. ‘But I would be more disappointed if we lost this fight. Burn it only if the alternative is losing.’

            ‘Yes, my lord,’ said Aximand.

            ‘I would be disappointed if we were forced to lose a resource like the Mausolytic Precinct,’ the Warmaster told Little Horus. The only light in the chamber came from the fire crackling in the great stone bowl.

            ‘But I would be more disappointed if we lost this fight. Burn it only if the alternative is... Aximand?’

            ‘Yes, my lord?’ said Aximand.

            ‘Your attention is elsewhere, I think.’

            ‘Lupercal, I’m sorry. For a moment there...’

            ‘What?’

            ‘I could hear breathing, my lord.’

            The Warmaster regarded him with what looked like amusement.

            ‘We all do it,’ he said.

            ‘No, I mean... Do you not hear it?’

            ‘I hear weakness,’ said the Warmaster. ‘Where is this frailty coming from, Aximand? You’re jumpy.’

            ‘My lord, is there somebody else in your quarters with us?’

            ‘No. No, there isn’t. I know this for a fact.’

            Aximand rose to his feet.

            ‘Then who is that?’ he asked. ‘Lord, who is that, standing just there, on the other side of the fire?’

            ‘Oh Little Horus,’ said the Warmaster, ‘you are beginning to speak with the tongue of madness.’

            And just as Aximand realised that he was, he woke.

            He assembled his squad commanders, and reviewed the tactical data. Aximand was, perhaps, the most scrupulous of all the Sixteenth Legion’s captains. He was not one, like Targost for example, who only ever wanted to know the fundamentals of a target, or was annoyed by extraneous detail. Aximand liked to know everything, every last facet. He studied climate charts. He learned the names and phases of Dwell’s eighteen moons. He studied the intelligencer plans of the Mausolytic Precinct, and had the Fleetmaster’s strategic architects fashion a sensory simulation he could walk through.

            He learned the names of his foe. The Tyjunate Compulsories, a high-calibre division of ceremonial city troops whose duty it was, by tradition, to protect the Precinct. The Chainveil, an elite corps named after the ritual screen surrounding the thrones of the Elders of Dwell, who were rumoured to be supplementing the Mausolytic defence.

            No confirmation had yet come of Meduson or any of his agents reaching Dwell. If he had beaten the 63rd in the race, it was thought unlikely he would position himself at the Precinct. This role would probably be handed off to one of his trusted warleaders, perhaps Bion Henricos, or to one of the White Scars captains such as Hibou Khan or Kublon Besk.

            ‘Let us hope for the Fifth,’ said Lev Goshen, Captain of the Twenty Fifth Company, who was to command the second wave behind Aximand. ‘Ill-favoured for static defence, they will make themselves crazy waiting for our overture, stuck in one place.’

            ‘The Scars should not be underestimated,’ said Grael Noctua, Sergeant of the Warlocked Tactical Squad.

            Goshen glanced up from the strategium display, looked at Noctua, and caught Aximand’s eye.

            ‘He’s got a voice, then,’ he remarked.

            There had been some murmuring amongst the upper ranks of the Legion when Noctua’s role as second to Aximand for the Mausolytic assault had been announced.

            ‘I have been advised I had better use it well, captain,’ said Noctua. There was a reserve to him, a restraint that reminded Aximand of someone. Noctua had that true son face, but the balance of humours was unusual: there was less of the arrogant charismatic and more of the calculated intellectual. Abaddon described Noctua as a blade weapon rather than a firearm.

            Goshen grinned.

            ‘Let’s have your wisdom, Noctua,’ he said.

            ‘I had the honour to serve alongside a detachment of the Fifth Legion seven years ago during the Tyrade System Compliance. They impressed me with their battlecraft. I was reminded of the Wolves.’

            ‘The Luna Wolves?’ asked Goshen.

            ‘The Wolves of Fenris, sir,’ Noctua replied.

            ‘That’s two enemies you’ve mentioned,’ said Goshen. ‘You understand they are our enemies, don’t you, Noctua?’

            ‘I understand they are both utterly lethal,’ replied Noctua. ‘Should we not appreciate the qualities of our enemies above all else?’

            Goshen hesitated.

            ‘This terrace here, this parade,’ he said, returning to the chart display. ‘We will need air cover to achieve it.’

            The briefing continued. Aximand thought for a moment that someone else had something to say, someone who had come into the room late, to stand at the back of the grouped officers.

            But there was nobody there.

            ‘I hear you’re considering Kibre and Noctua,’ said the Warmaster.

            ‘You hear everything, as usual,’ Aximand replied.

            ‘Not Targost, then?’

            ‘He has other responsibilities,’ said Aximand, ‘and we did not wish to dilute them.’

            The Warmaster nodded. He moved another carved bone counter across the board between them. Of all his sons, Aximand most enjoyed the practice and discipline of strategy games. The anteroom was furnished with many fine sets, most of them gifts from war leaders or brother primarchs. There was regicide, chatranj, caturanga, go, hneftafl, xadrez, mahnkala, zatrikion... It was rare to find a primarch’s homeworld where a skill-honing wargame had not evolved.

            ‘Ezekyle favoured Targost, didn’t he?’ asked the Warmaster as Aximand studied the field and contemplated his reply.

            ‘He did, sir.’

            ‘And when you persuaded him against the choice, did you tell him the real reason, or did you manufacture one that would be more palatable to him?’

            Aximand hesitated. He remembered the conversation with Abaddon, wherein he had not chosen to say that Targost, the Captain of the Seventh Company, was not a son, a true son. He was Cthonic stock. Aximand had not chosen to reveal that part of his disinclination.

            ‘I didn’t–’ Aximand started to say.

            ‘Tell him?’ asked the primarch.

            ‘I didn’t... recognise my true motive,’ Aximand replied, with reluctance.

            ‘Interesting when you see it, though, don’t you think?’ the Warmaster asked, sitting back. ‘You and Ezekyle, Widowmaker and Noctua, all of you... What is it you call it? True sons?’

            ‘True sons,’ Aximand echoed.

            ‘So, do you suppose,’ the Warmaster chuckled, ‘it is because you prefer the reassurance of a familiar face? Or is there another face you wish to block out?’

            Dry air, cool, a faint hint of salt. The Sea of Enna in the flat rift valley below, like a sheet of glass in a culvert. Along its shore, the teeming city of Tyjun, collected like flotsam, like multicoloured shingle. On the far side of the immense valley, across the back of the sleeping sea, the block line of the opposite valley wall, squared off and velvet black in the dawn light. The sky was violet, shot with stars and occasional moons. To the north, the pre-glow of the rising sun. To the east, the false dawn of the port, on fire since midnight. That was the handiwork of Jerrod and Thirteenth Company.

            In the high morning of the Mausolytic plateau, the buildings of the Precinct stood like stone hangars for vast airships. Rectangles, unadorned, they were faced with yellow stone rendered gold by the early light. In places they were linked by soaring colonnades and porticos, gold stone columns the size of ancient redwoods. The pavements were made of etched steel, polished like mirrors. The atmosphere held a dry, static charge, as if great electromagnetic machines operated nearby.

            The vaunted Chainveil made no appearance in the direct line at the Precinct. Chainveil soldiers caused a brief delay to Abaddon’s advance into the City of Elders. The First Captain made curt, grudging reports of their determined resistance. Goshen’s advance took a bastion west of the city where the defenders boasted they were Chainveil, but Goshen was sure they were merely regular army claiming to be the elites, so as to seem more intimidating.

            He slew them all, anyway.

            The Tyjunate Compulsories, resplendent in silver and crimson wargear, formed the main defence. The troopers were armed with long power swords, with energised axes and pikes, with munition-loaders, with sonic tubes, with plasmic-system weapons and las-rifles. Entering combat, they engaged individual, segmented force shields, light-absorbing fog that dimmed the glory of their ritual uniforms and made them look as if they’d each been enveloped in a hand-cut piece of storm cloud.

            The shields were annoyingly effective, and deflected most gunfire over a certain range. When a Legiones Astartes bolt-round did pierce them, either through a direct hit or by finding the joint between segments, the Compulsory inside detonated, and his explosive demise was contained, pressurised, inside the shield, like a firecracker destroying a piece of soft fruit inside a bottle. The noise of it was dull, muted, like the slap of a muffled bass drum.

            It was infuriating. Dug in around the looming structures of the Precinct, the Compulsories were actually retarding a Legiones Astartes assault. They were holding the line against the Sixteenth.

            Yet they were men. Just men. Aximand felt a sense of injustice. The force shields, certainly not the best he’d ever seen, but made effective by their individual mounts and portability, were giving the Compulsories enough of an edge to bother the Sons of Horus. It was an aberration brought about by circumstance. Human soldiers, no matter how good they were, did not resist transhuman soldiers. Aximand wanted to crush them, pulverise them for their temerity, to call in an orbital barrage, ranged shelling, or even one of the squadrons of superheavy armour pieces that were basking nearby like vast crocodilian predators in the rising sun, waiting for his word to send them slipping down to the kill.

            However, any of those actions would also raze the Precinct. The Compulsories were protected by the very buildings they were defending. Aximand had latitude, but he sincerely intended to prove he didn’t need it.

            Less than twenty minutes from drop landing, the assault on the Mausolytic Precinct had grown bitter and choked. The Sons of Horus and their Army auxiliaries had lost momentum, their offensive stalled, all their advantages cancelled out by the clear-sighted deployment of professional soldiers exploiting their combat assets.

            Yade Durso, second captain of Aximand’s company, cursed all the spirits of vengeance and destiny over the vox-link, but Aximand knew Durso was actually cursing him. Xachary Scipion of Metallun Reaver reported his assumption of squad command. His sergeant, old Gaspir Yunkwist, was dead. There was heat in Scipion’s voice. He was calling for an Apothecary. Zeb Zenonius of Bale Tactical reported two fallen.

            Somewhere, someone was breathing.

            Taking hits, driven into cover, Aximand looked up at the sky above the plateau. It was still flooded with the blue ink of night, but the pale margins were increasing. He could see four of Dwell’s moons in the sky, one large, the other three not much larger than stars. Because of their relative positions, they were each in a different phase: full, gibbous, half, new.

            The sight of it let his anger breathe out for a second. It was, what? A sign? A portent?

            His vox tapped. Visor display identified the link as Grael Noctua.

            ‘Forget bolters,’ said Noctua. ‘Blades.’

            ‘Indeed?’ Aximand replied.

            ‘Get in close, and the fools do not stand a chance,’ Noctua replied.

            Aximand smiled.

            ‘Blades! he yelled. He locked his bolter to his hip, and unsheathed his sword. Double-edged, power-active, Cthonic bluesteel, etched along the fuller. He’d called it Mourn-it-all. His combat shield was already on his left arm.

            He didn’t wait to see his order observed. He powered out of cover, lasbolts clipping his shield face and dinking his leg plates. Two big, bounding strides put him on the colonnade, moving fast, head down, blade up. He saw the first of the Compulsories up ahead, fogged in their shields, dug in around the massive pillars, firing at him. He could see their faces, pale and astonished.

            Transhuman dread. Aximand had heard iterators talk of the condition. He’d heard descriptions of it from regular Army officers too. The sight of an Adeptus Astartes was one thing: taller and broader than a man could ever be, armoured like a demigod. The singularity of purpose was self-evident. An Adeptus Astartes was designed to fight and kill anything that didn’t annihilate it first. If you saw an Adeptus Astartes, you knew you were in trouble. The appearance alone cowed you with fear.

            But to see one move. Apparently that was the real thing. Nothing human-shaped should be so fast, so lithe, so powerful, especially not anything in excess of two metres tall and carrying more armour than four normal men could lift. The sight of an Adeptus Astartes was one thing, but the moving fact of one was quite another. The psychologists called it transhuman dread. It froze a man, stuck him to the ground, caused his mind to lock up, made him lose control of bladder and bowel. Something huge and warlike gave pause: something huge and warlike and moving with the speed of a striking snake, that was when you knew that gods moved amongst men, and that there existed a scale of strength and speed beyond anything mortal, and that you were about to die and, if you were really lucking, there might be just enough time to piss yourself first.

            Aximand saw that dumbfounded look on the faces of the Dwellers he was about to gut and section. He heard the men of Fifth Company following behind him. He felt the joy of being Horus’s son.

            Noctua was right. They had been wasting time and effort with guns and bolters. The shields were good enough to make the percentages of a firefight poor. The shields were good enough to stop blades too. Bayonets, that was. Pole arms. A sabre. Maybe even a powered blade.

            But not, not for a moment, a powered blade driven by transhuman arm.

            The shields shattered. They cracked and broke with the sounds of smashing glass. Sharp chips of shield segment flew into the air for a microsecond after each blow before evaporating, the shield first, and then the body inside: the energy shell, then the meat. Blood exploded from the yawning wounds under pressure, jetting into the morning air, hosing Aximand and the great columns of the colonnade with arterial spray. Each sword stroke made an explosion of viscera, a puff of red in the air as if a bag of blood had been detonated and its contents particulated.

            Whatever edge the Tyjunate Compulsories had owned, they lost it the moment the most advanced warriors in the Imperium remembered they were adaptable enough to fight the old-fashioned way: blade and trade, strength of arm, sword-school close combat.

            The Fifth made the entrance to the Precinct less than five minutes after Aximand’s inspiring charge.

            Aximand went into the thick of it with three sons at his side: Zenonius of Bale, Ger Geraddon, and Mir Amindaza, both of Tithonus Assault. They went in at the end of the grand colonnade, under a gateway called the Arch of Answers. Dweller Compulsories were packed in beneath the shadow of the vast archway, ready to defend the sunward entrances of the East Mausolytic Hall.

            The air was full of shots, like neon rain, horizontal. Energy bolts and tracer rounds shone especially brightly in the shade of the vast archway. The Sons struck the line with their heads down and their shields up, sucking up the lancing gunfire, barrelling Compulsories over in a crush, like a surging mass of rioters. Dwellers fell, their shields still lit, rolling and bouncing inside the hard-light shells. There was a crush, a sense of crowd momentum, of thousands of bodies rippling as one mass. There were bodies underfoot. Hands clawed. Weapons fired point blank.

            The Sons bit deeper. Their shields were ploughs and rams. Their swords were scythes and pikes. Compulsories dropped, spilling from their shredding, fizzling shields in tattered states, blood sobbing and squirting out of the compromised fields. Blades hooked other men, hurled them into the air, their bodies spinning, tumbling, flailing overhead, above the crowd, crashing back down on the necks and shoulders of their kin. Some men were dead, upright, their bodies kept from falling by the press of the mass. The mirrored pavements were running with blood. The huge pool, draining out from under the fighting mass, spread its racing edges out across the etched steel, wider, broader, crimson in the sunlight, scarlet in the shadows, flooding around the bases of the columns, making islands out of plinths and pillars.

            The screaming voices of the Compulsories were either muffled by their cocooning shields or rendered tinny and raw by the vox-intercept feeding into the comm systems of the Legiones Astartes. Most of the sounds Aximand registered were the concussive impacts as he chopped and barged and hacked. Mourn-it-all was running red on its hilt and grip, blood-smoke cooking off the powered blade. Blood had painted Aximand’s sword arm to the elbow and was dripping off the edges of his vambrace. His shield boss was bruised, and splattered with gore and brain matter.

            Behind everything, he could hear breathing.

            Zenonius moved past him, shield up, ripping through waists and hips and ribcages with broad, horizontal slashes, bisecting bodies, rupturing shields. It was a devastating, mechanical action, almost agricultural rather than martial. He was reaping his way through the enemy to reach the Mausolytic Halls. Like a worker in a field of crops, he was cutting his row, back and forth, swinging his long blade from the shoulders.

            To Aximand’s left, Amindaza was treating it more as sport. His blade was shorter, and he toyed with the Compulsories he was rushing, as if trying to engage them in combat and test their skill. He looked for blades to lock with, to deflect. No one met his challenge. They were too busy trying to fall back out of the path of his butcher assault. Amindaza favoured hacking downstrokes, deep, crushing blows coming from over the shoulder that demolished his foes and smashed them onto the ground at his feet. Aximand could hear him calling out his enemies, daring them to fight him. He railed contempt at their attempts to retreat. He killed men whether they were facing him or not.

            For his part, Aximand, like Geraddon, preferred a more textbook mass assault form: shield at eye level, used as ram; sword tip-forward at chest level, punching and stabbing like a piston from under the shield rim. It was relentless. It was like rolling a heavy piece of fruit into rows of toy soldiers and watching them knocked down and scattered.

            The assault was so fierce that a brown smoke of aerosolised blood was fuming off the fighting line into the sunlight.

            Zenonius reached the East Hall entrance, and slaughtered a dozen Compulsories around the ornamental fountain and pool in the deep, sunlit antehall. Larger cohorts of Aximand’s company were on their heels on the colonnade. The lake of blood was so deep and swollen, there was some pressure in it as it grew and spread. Bodies on the smooth, polished floor rotated in its current, end to end, like sticks of driftwood caught by an overspilling river.

            Aximand followed Zenonius into the antehall. The walls were sheer, the height of the hall impressive, though the floor plan was a small, square area with a central fountain. The top was open to the sky, so that sunlight could lance down and illuminate the quiet space, the polished floor, the clear water, the calyx and tulip carvings of the fountain’s main figure.

            Blood spattered the floor, and pooled around crumpled figures and broken weapons. Bloody handprints marked the edges of the fountain bowl where men had struggled to prop themselves up as their last breaths escaped. On the intricately carved walls, jets of blood had left long, pressure-pattern arcs, huge horsetail fans or fern-frond spatters. Some stretched five or six metres up the sheer walls.

            Aximand prowled forward. The place was almost tranquil. The din of fighting outside, muffled by the walls, sounded more like the grumble of a distant storm. Zenonius moved ahead, pausing to finish a wounded Compulsory. Amindaza stepped into the light on the far side of the ante-hall, blade sizzling with frying blood. He had entered via one of the other doorways. Two Compulsories and a Precinct docent rushed him, and he turned to greet them with his sword.

           Aximand could hear breathing again. It was close now, closer than ever before, closer than a pulse beat in a man’s brow. The breathing, the sense of presence, had followed him out of his dreams and into his daily life. It had got closer and closer, until it was hovering at his shoulder. Now it sounded as though it were sharing his helmet, as though there were two heads in the one helm. Aximand stopped breathing for a moment to see if it was just some acoustic trick, an echo of his respiration.

            Silence.

            He was about to breathe again when it started, quiet but close, slow and clam, like the hushing of a gentle sea.

            ‘Where are you?’ he asked.

            ‘Say again!’ Amindaza crackled over the vox.

            ‘Specify, sir?’ Geraddon linked.

            ‘Nothing, nothing!’ Aximand answered. ‘Continue.’

            Foolish, so foolish, to let it better him like that. To make him speak of it, to speak out loud. He was only talking to himself, to a trick of his mind. He was only talking to his fear.

            And fear, like dreams, was something an Adeptus Astartes was not supposed to have.

            He knew fear, and he knew the fear would go the moment he could identify the stranger, the moment the intruder’s face became plain to him. Little Horus Aximand wasn’t afraid of anything except the unknown.

            A Compulsory charged him from the brown shadows, a lance in his hands. The blade-tip twinkled with blue light, a photonic edge.

            Aximand sidestepped, swung his shield, and put the man on the floor. The blow cracked the Compulsory’s bodyshield and broke his arm. He yelped. Aximand was about to put his foot on him and finish the job when two more came at him. Faster now, more urgent, he rotated, scooping Mourn-it-all around in a backwards stroke that snipped the blade-heads off the lances stabbing at him. The blunt hafts cracked and bent against his ceramite armour. His sword ripped one man apart, opening his shield and eviscerating the body inside. He kicked the other backwards, crunching man and energy cocoon into the ante-hall wall. The impact grazed the stone, and caused chips to fly out. Stepping in, Aximand put his blade through the man’s chest. Mourn-it-all punched through the shield shell, the man, and the wall behind him. The Compulsory was pinned there for a second, like an insect specimen on a felt pad, his body-shield flickering and blinking as it shorted out.

            Aximand yanked the blade out, and the man collapsed at his feet.

            The breathing had drawn so very close.

            Aximand stepped forward, through a tall archway, into one of the main Mausolytic Halls. The space was vast, and the air was radiant with yellow light. It was like stepping into heaven. The thin, quiet, shrouded dead of Dwell were suspended all around him in clear glass tubes, supported horizontally in columns of light. A million bodies, framed in light and glass and gravimetric energy, united in cybernation.

            Zeb Zenonius of Bale tactical squad lay dead on the floor. He had been split open like a piece of shellfish.

            The sight should have put Aximand on guard, on the highest pitch of readiness and alertness. But the breathing was louder than ever and, despite his transhuman instincts, he tried to see where it was coming from.

            So the first blow took him by surprise. His attacker struck from the side. Only by fluke did Aximand’s shield take the brunt of it. The attacker’s sword split the shield, and cut into Aximand’s forearm beneath. Aximand staggered backwards, outraged and surprised.

            Outraged by his distracted error.

            Surprised by the vast strength of the being assaulting him.

            Aximand rallied, blocking with his sword. He was face to face with a Legiones Astartes, a flesh-spare brute whose glossy black armour was laced with augmetic systems and stark white insignia: a senior captain of the Tenth Legion, the Iron Hands of Medusa. For a moment, Aximand thought it was Shadrak Meduson himself. The warrior had the stature of a warleader, and bore the sigils of the Sorrgol Clan. But visual tagging via visor display identified his foe as Bion Henricos, Meduson’s favoured lieutenant. Henricos’s sword was a long blade of augmented-function Medusan steel.

            They whirled down the cybernation hall like dancers, trading blows. Henricos represented a greater challenge than all the Compulsories Aximand had doomed that day, combined. The Medusan’s skill was formidable. His augmetic strength far exceeded Aximand’s. His speed was breathtaking.

            For a thrilling instant, Aximand wondered if he was, at last, experiencing transhuman dread for himself.

            They fought their way towards the centre of the hall, where a great bio-stasis generator stack rose like a temple altar, gilded and covered with angelic figures. The glass-packed bodies radiated out from it, stack upon suspended stack. Huge white statues, demi-gods shrouded in long capes, bright as snow, knelt in obeisance before the central block.

            The silvered-black armour of the Iron Hands warrior gleamed like slicked oil in the Precinct’s weird light. His blade moved like a ribbon of light. Aximand got around the expert guard, and delivered a glancing blow with his hilt that cracked the chest plating of Henricos’s wargear. Henricos responded by planting his feet, locking their blades in a rigid cruciform, and shoulder-barging Aximand.

            Little Horus lurched backwards and crashed into the nearest row of cybernators. Glass sleeves shattered, and showers of fragments flew up and caught the light like spring petals. Cybernation tubes cannoned into one another, cracking and disintegrating. Some were pushed clear of the gravimetric support fields and fell, smashing on the polished metal floor. Power relays shorted out. Desiccated bodies tumbled out into the air like bundles of roots and twigs.

            Bion Henricos crunched over broken glass and dry bones to get at Aximand. He shoved suspended glass sleeves out of his way. There was a bitter stink of resins and preserving spices. Aximand struggled to get up. Flickers of energy, dark and unhealthy, were flaring like troubled synapses out from the disrupted area of the Mausolytic array. The coloured bursts writhed and fired out into the serene, golden layers of the undamaged structure. Odd harmonics, like the low moaning of a thousand voices relayed by a low quality vox signal, filled the hall.

            Henricos reached Aximand. Mourn-it-all cut him across the eyes, shattering one lens unit, and raked a gouge down his stomach and hip. Henricos struck with a swing that would have severed Aximand’s head if he had been a hand-span closer. He drove the Medusan warleader back across the carpet of ancient, pulverised glass and mummified scraps. His next blow wounded Henricos in the thigh. Something silvery, like liquid mercury, sobbed out.

            Henricos put him on the ground. Aximand wasn’t quite sure how he’d been hit, but the impact rattled his brain inside his skull and filled his mouth and nostrils with blood. He was face down, groping for his fallen sword, concussed and dazed and vulnerable.

            He looked up, wondering why Henricos hadn’t finished him. Amindaza of Tithonus was locking swords with his opponent. Amindaza had fought his way into the Hall, and Geraddon wasn’t far behind. The loud and repeated discharge of weapons from outside the entry space suggested that the assault had washed into the main area of the Precinct, and that the Compulsories were in retreat.

            Amindaza had been wounded on his way into the Hall, and his arm was slow. His arrival and interception had saved Aximand, but it had also doomed Amindaza. Henricos was a far superior swordsman. Before Aximand, dazed and spitting blood, could get back up, Henricos had delivered a blow that split Amindaza from his left shoulder to his right hip. He was simply bisected, diagonally, in one stroke. The sections of him fell hard, messily, in an apocalyptic release of blood.

            Geraddon flew at him, and Henricos knocked him aside. Geraddon smashed into another row of caskets.

            Aximand put Mourn-it-all through Henricos’s spine so that the tip shattered the aquila on the Medusan’s breastplate.

            Henricos fell to one knee, and then onto his face. Aximand knelt on his back and cut his helmet off. Henricos’s pale face was turned to the side, cheek to the floor, the white skin flecked with beads of dark red blood.

            ‘Pray this death takes you, traitor,’ said Aximand. ‘Other deaths would be less forgiving.’

            Henricos gurgled something.

            ‘What?’ asked Aximand, pressing his blade against the neck of the Iron Hands warleader.

            ‘You are not the trophy we hoped for,’ Henricos whispered.

            ‘Trophy?’

            ‘Knew we couldn’t beat you, wanted to hurt you instead. Thought... thought he would value the Mausolytic Precinct above all, and lead this segment attack personally.’

            ‘This was supposed to be a trap for Lupercal?’

            ‘May he burn forever.’

            Aximand laughed.

            ‘But your master is a coward and a traitor,’ murmured Henricos, ‘and all he sends is you.’

            ‘It would appear I’m quite enough,’ replied Aximand. ‘What did you hope to do?’

            Henricos gurgled.

            ‘I said, what kind of trap is one flesh-spare warrior?’

            Henricos did not reply. All the life had drained out of him.

            Aximand rose, and kicked the corpse.

            Geraddon had got back up.

            ‘What was he saying?’ he asked.

            ‘Nonsense,’ Aximand replied. ‘Simply nonsense. He was desperate.’

            ‘It was supposed to be a trap,’ said Geraddon, ‘so why was he alone?’

            The sound of breathing had come back. Aximand turned slowly and realised that it was simply the background noise of the Mausolytic Hall, the slow, throbbing murmur of the cybernation system. It was the pulse of the sleeping dead.

            He felt like a fool. When the operation was over, he would meditate. He would clean his mind of the fears and dreams that had accumulated. He would purify his thoughts and expel his weaknesses. To serve the Warmaster, he needed to be an even-tempered weapon.

            He had let himself slacken. It was time he recommitted his mind and made himself truer to the image of Lupercal.

            Aximand opened the vox, and took stock. Large portions of the Precinct were in Sixteenth Legion hands. Grael Noctua reported the West Hall and the approaches secure. Aximand ordered squads forward into the East Hall, to his position. He ordered all access ways closed.

            He looked at the cybernation array around them. A little damage had been done, but not too much. The facility was essentially intact, and a little pressure applied to Dweller technadepts would soon have repairs completed.

            The huge white statues of shrouded demi-gods, bright as snow, that had been kneeling in obeisance around the central great bio-stasis generator stack were gone.

            ‘Wait–’ Aximand began.

            The White Scars killteam rushed them. The five killers of the Fifth Legion had thrown off the white cloaks they had used for concealment. They had used chalk dust or some funereal powder to mask the crimson edges of their armour. Their helms were crowskull, the Corvus pattern. It seemed Lev Goshen had been badly mistaken. The White Scars did have the patience to wait. What on the open field was fast hit and run became, in city fighting, stealth and swift ambush.

            Grael Noctua’s warning had been shrewd.

            The first one was on him. It was Hibou Khan. Aximand identified him from his rank and company pins. This was the practice of burkutchi, to ‘cut the head’. The term came from the Chogorisian art of hunting with eagles, the great akwilluh, using the birds to draw out and isolate the bull leader of a herd. Once the bull was dead, the herd was broken.

            It had been their intention to decapitate the Sixteenth. Thwarted, they were going to make do with other prey: other bulls, junior bulls, company captains.

            Aximand smashed Hibou away, and broke the White Scar’s blade on Mourn-it-all’s edge. Another Scar lunged in. Aximand parried and heard Geraddon cry out as two blades punched through him. Aximand drove his sword down through the cap of the next snow-white crowskull helm that came at him. Suddenly, not all the red decorating the White Scar wargear was scarlet lacquer. He reached for his bolter.

            Gunfire ripped through the Mausolytic Precinct. More White Scars and renegade Iron Hands had sprung their trap. Squads of Aximand’s company were meeting both, bolter to bolter. Fighting on, out-numbered, Aximand slew another White Scar, blasting his bolter point-blank through an eyeslit. He yelled over the link to Noctua and his lieutenant captains to close the fight down.

            To be on alert that their enemy was hunting captains as trophies.

            To be aware that they weren’t facing Tyjunate Compulsories or Chainveil anymore.

            They were facing Adeptus Astartes transhumans.

            Hibou Khan had got back on his feet. To replace his own, broken sword, the White Scar had snatched up the long blade of Medusan steel that Henricos had wielded. His first blow notched Mourn-it-all, his second beat Aximand’s guard.

            His third blow caught Little Horus vertically at the cheek, in a line that began just over the right eye-piece where his Mournival mark was displayed. The bonded ceramite of his helm didn’t even seem to stop the Medusan weapon.

            Aximand fell. There was a great deal of blood suddenly, and he couldn’t properly account for its source. He saw something on the etched steel floor in front of him.

            It was the visor and snout section of his own helmet, the entire faceplate. It had been sheared off, peeled cleanly away, as though shaved by an industrial slicer.

            And it was not empty.

            The reattachment left a scar. It set the character of the face differently, altered the seating of the muscles. Somehow, the wrongness, the imperfection, made him more like Horus, not less.

            Noctua brought his squads into the East Hall in a rapid counterstrike, and broke the burkutchi. Hibou Khan was denied the opportunity to finish the job. Most of the loyalist Space Marines were driven back out into the lap of Lev Goshen and his Terminator squads.

            Hibou Khan fled, leaving twelve men of Aximand’s company dead by his own hand, and earning himself a place on Aximand’s death list.

            A new helm was forged for him, with the half-moon above the right eye. The armourers were already busy graving Mournival marks to the helms of Grael Noctua and Falkus Kibre. When Aximand was shown the pieces of his old headgear, he saw that the blade had sliced his half-moon mark in half.

            Had he been a man prone to superstition and belief in omens, he might have read bad things into this. But he was not afraid of change. He was not really even a man.

            Under the surgeon’s knife, in stasis sleep, he had dreamt one final dream. The identity of the faceless intruder had ultimately been revealed. Aximand had been slightly apprehensive that the intruder’s face would turn out to be his own, or one just like it, and that lengthy psychological work would be required as a consequence.

            It was not. As they restored his face, he dreamt the face of the other.

            It was the face of Garviel Loken.

            When Aximand woke, he felt a measure of happiness and relief. A man could not be afraid of the dead, and Loken was dead, and that fact would not change.

            Not that he was afraid of change. Change was, he always insisted, part of his ruling character.

            ‘The melancholic humour is protean,’ he said. ‘It possesses the quality of autumn. It is transformative. It makes me the accelerator of death, the enabler of ends and beginnings. I was made to clear away this world ready for renewal. To change the order of things. To cast out the false and enthrone the true. This is my purpose. I am not afraid.’

            Then again, once they reattached his face, all he ever really looked was invincible.